Editor,
In December 2002 the city of Laguna Beach removed the hedge height limit from the municipal code. Instead of requiring a fixed height for hedges, a complaint driven system was installed, where a neighbor has to complain and prove view blockage to force a hedge to be trimmed.
I have found that almost every other city has a fixed hedge height limit (other than Hollywood and Montecito). In those cities, hedges can grow to any height. In every other city there is a hedge height code, which is usually four feet in the front yard, and six or eight feet on the side and back.
I believe that it was determined that there were too many hedges that were out of compliance in Laguna Beach, and it would therefore be too hard to use code enforcement to bring them in compliance. Instead, neighbors must file a hedge height claim and prove a view blockage to control the height of hedges.
Is this a bad thing? As an older person I am used to the idea that a neighborhood has front yards. A local landscape architect told me she likes to see front yards, and that is why we have front yard setbacks. There are entire books about front yards and why we have them. They make a neighborhood seem neighborly, open, and airy.
Since our hedge code is driven by preventing view blockage, the idea of preserving front yards and open airy neighborhood streets has kind of gotten tossed aside.
Is this what we want? It isn’t what most other cities want. Views are one thing, but streets with fortresses made out of hedges are what we might end up with the way our code stands.
I have driven around and I see front yard hedges that seem to be getting bigger and bigger, because there is no longer a simple code enforcement. It’s almost as if some houses have no front yard setback anymore as people have created virtual rooms out of hedges that start at the property line.
I wonder if at some point we will wonder what happened. At that point it will be really tough to turn back the clock.
If we want to put the burden of regulating hedges on the hedge owner instead of on neighbors, we have to have a fixed height in the code.
If you like old-fashioned neighborhoods with front yards, open, airy space between houses, and don’t like green tunnels and fortresses of hedges, please email me at [email protected].
Susan Elliott, Laguna Beach
If all Laguna Beach neiborhoods were diagonal and perpendicular with level lots with planed communities I believe what you profess would be true…. But alas it is not. These are also times of the recent past for nostalgia’s sake, to be thankful for not everyone as present carries a high resolution camera or film studio within their grasp. Gone are also the days when fewer vehicles pass upon the local throughfares at reasonable hours or velocities, in fact many a landscape incorporates the attributes of barrier for the protection of it’s occupants.
Let us not discriminate against those who can not show just cause for their privacy over those who want to expose it, and let those who permit others freedoms in their own voyeristic fashion.